On reusing conceptual data modeling for ontology engineering

Abstract

This paper describes a semantic portal through which knowledge can be gathered, stored, secured and accessed by members of a certain community. In particu-lar, this portal takes into account companies and research institutes participating in the E.U. funded thematic network called OntoWeb. Ontology-based annotation of information is a prerequisite in order to offer the possibility of knowledge retrieval and extraction. The usage of well-defined semantics allows for the knowledge ex-change between different OntoWeb community members. Thus, members are able to publish annotated information on the web, which is then crawled by a syndicator and stored in the portal’s knowledge base. The backbone of the portal architecture consists of a knowledge base in which the ontology and the instances are stored and maintained. In addition, ontology-boosted query mechanisms and presentation facilities are provided